Sunday, October 2, 2011

Mesozoic Miscellany 45

Been a while since the last roundup, so there's plenty of meat to chew on. There's been a lot of growth in the dino blogosphere lately, and while I'm thrilled about it, I also wish it wasn't happening just as I was getting super-busy with school!

Anyhow, first up, check out Brian Engh's test animation of a Cryolophosaurus as part of the "Dinosaurs Reanimated" project.

In the ultimate example of turning lemons into lemonade, a contentious topic on the Dinosaur Mailing List has spurred the creation of a new mailing list dedicated to the history of paleontology. It's only hours old, so if you want to get in on the ground floor, now's the time. This is good timing for me, as I'm planning a project about paleontology history for my independent study in typography this semester (it's still taking shape, but trust me, it shall be shared here). The list is hosted at Google groups, a venue I'm new to, so

Tony Martin is retiring the Great Cretaceous Walk blog for now, as he's concentrating on his new blog focusing on more recent ichnology as he prepares for the IU Press publication of his new book, Life Traces of the Georgia Coast. I love GCW and will miss it, but it's hard to shed tears, as Tony's still writing terrific stuff, and hints at a possible book about his travels in Australia.

Victoria Arbour writes about... picking the nose of a Euplocephalus. Examining a broken skull fossil, Arbour, with Tetsuo Miyashita and Phil Currie, verified what Larry Witmer and Ryan Ridgely observed to be a "crazy straw" nasal passage in a couple different ankylosaurs in 2008. The Witmer Lab blog Pick & Scalpel has posted on this research as well. Wouldn't it be nice to see both the heat exchange and resonating hypotheses explored in a future documentary? I mean, it's not exactly hordes of tyrannosaurs mobbing duckbills, but why not let some thyreophorans step into the limelight?

To wrap things up, because I'm getting mighty sleepy, a new PLoS One paper sinks Anatotitan, AKA my Twitter, Flickr, and DeviantArt handle, into Edmontosaurus. Well, phooey. But still, one of the great taxon names of all time, and I'll keep wearing it proudly.

We are still stuck with Trachodon, sadly: while its not useful, it does apply to a tooth from the Judith River Formation of Montana which may/may not belong to a host of edmontosaurines. This uncertainty makes Madam Mirabilis nee Trachodon a non-useful, but still "current" name. Or, a "nomen dubium."